Boston is alive with 'The Sound of Music'

Wednesday

Some musicals are so beloved that familiarity doesn’t diminish their appeal. That’s certainly true for "The Sound of Music," whose new touring production has surprises for fans.

“People love Maria and the kids and the romance,” said tour director Matt Lenz, whose production runs May 1-13 at the Boch Center Wang Theatre. “That’s all still there, but we wanted to shine light on the more sophisticated parts of the story that often gets glossed over. It’s 1938 Austria and there’s a sense of something coming. “

To achieve that focus, Broadway Tony Award-winning director Jack O’Brien returned to the original Broadway production of 1959, which features songs cut from many stage versions and the blockbuster Academy Award-winning 1965 movie starring Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer.

Based on the memoir “The Story of the Trapp Family Singers” by Maria von Trapp, the “Sound of Music” is the story of young woman studying to be a nun who becomes the governess of seven children to a retired Austrian naval officer mourning his wife years after her death. Into a household run like a military unit, she brings music and love and faces a crisis when she realizes she has feelings for the captain, engaged to another woman. When he calls off the engagement, they marry and together decide to flee Austria so he will not have to work for the Nazis.

Lenz, who like many people fell in love with the musical as a child, said he and O’Brien were moved by the issues of conscience and civil disobedience raised in the show.

“I think going into this production, we didn’t expect that the piece would reveal itself to us in such a deeply profound way,” he said. “People’s principles and what they choose to stand up against really resonates now.”

In the song “No Way to Stop It,” Captain von Trapp expresses his refusal to serve in the German navy, while his fiancé Baroness Elsa Schräder, and his friend, Max Detweiler want to play it safe and accept the Nazi annexation of Austria.

This production also returns to the original song order, which serves to develop the characters. “My Favorite Things” is sung by Maria and the Mother Abbess before she leaves the Abbey to care for the von Trapp children, rather than by Maria and the children in her bedroom. In that context, it provides a back story to Maria’s zest for life and latent desire to live outside the confines of the monastery. When Maria sings “The Lonely Goatherd” to calm the children after they scamper into her bedroom when a nighttime storm frightens them, she wins their trust and affection.

For all the songs, written by composer Richard Rodgers and lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II, Lenz directed the actors to listen to the lyrics with a fresh sensibility and to sing them so that audiences understand every word and experience the emotions.

“The songs are so great and everyone knows them, so it’s very easy for them to just wash over the audience,” Lenz said. “We want people to hear this great music fully and what it is meant to do with the story.”

This touring production was created in the fall of 2015 – the 50th anniversary of the film - by O’Brien and has toured continuously since then. Lenz, who has been an associate director for O’Brien’s Broadway productions of “Hairspray,” “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” and “Catch Me If You Can,” became national tour director after O’Brien was tied up with the recent Broadway revival of the musical “Carousel.”

Recast last summer, the show stars Jill-Christine Wiley, who was Belle in the national tour of “Beauty and the Beast,” and Mike McLean, who was Benny on the national tour of “Guys and Dolls."

“Jill has a purity of spirit and energy, and she doesn’t overly complicate things,” Lenz said. “As the play unfolds, you see her maturing. Mike has a very strong presence and wisdom and depth of emotional life. While their energies are different, they have that chemistry.”

Reach Jody Feinberg at jfeinberg@ledger.com. Follow her on Twitter @JodyF_Ledger.